The Concert

On a gilt stage drenched in champagne light, the pianist’s fingers detonate Chopin like shrapnel; every arpeggio is a love-bullet fired into the bourgeois darkness. Offstage, the same hands unbutton danger: he elopes with a siren whose gaze is a switchblade, leaving behind a wife whose silence rings louder than any encore. Into the vacuum glides the cuckolded husband, a collector of broken melodies, who installs the abandoned spouse in a mansion of velvet farce. The four concoct a domestic counterpoint—two adulterous fugues, two resigned accompaniments—until the pretense itself becomes a fifth character, tap-dancing on their nerves. When the inevitable recital arrives, the pianist must choose between the thunder of public adoration and the hush of a marriage he turned into a ghost note.